Jack Vance
Award-winning science fiction and fantasy author, who wrote the four-book Dying Earth series.
"My clever baton holds your unnatural sorcery in abeyance."
In the end, death came uniformly to all, and all extracted as much satisfaction from their dying as this essentially graceless process could afford.
“I think that I will not answer that question,” he said at last. “I would create as many false images as there were ears to hear me.”
“Half as many,” Clissum pointed out delicately.
I am not called Cugel the Clever for nothing.
Human interactions, stimulated as they are by disequilibrium, never achieve balance. In even the most favorable transaction, one party—whether he realizes it or not—must always come out the worse.
When you demand the nature of my motives, you reveal the style of your thinking to be callow, captious, superficial, craven, uncertain and impudent.
It is useless, after all, to complain against inexorable reality.
Mischief moves somewhere near and I must blast it with my magic!
"I have transcended that phase in my intellectual growth where I discover humour in simple freakishness. What exists is real; therefore it is tragic, since whatever lives must die. Only fantasy, the vapors rising from sheer nonsense, can now excite my laughter." - Lord Pirmence of Castle Lutez
“Down we go,” said Paddy. “Now pray to Saint Anthony if you be a good Catholic—”
“I'm not,” snapped Fay, “and if you'll give more mind to the boat and less to religion we’ll gain by it.”
I also am of noble blood, or so it seems to me. — Orlo
“Truth” is contained in the preconceptions of him who seeks to define it. Any organization of ideas whatever presupposes a judgment on the world.
“You will understand,” said the Weaponeer, “that a pattern for events exists. It is the function of such as myself to shape events so that they will fit the pattern.” He bent, with a graceful sweep of arm, and seized a small jagged pebble. “Just as I can grind this bit of rock to fit a round aperture.”
Kergan Banbeck reached forward, took the pebble, tossed it high over the tumbled boulders. “That bit of rock you shall never shape to fit a round hole.”
The Weaponeer shook his head in mild deprecation. “There is always more rock.”
“And there are always more holes,” declared Kergan Banbeck.
Excellent; all is well. The 'everlasting tedium' exactly countervenes the 'immediate onset of death' and I am left only with the 'canker' which, in the person of Firx, already afflicts me. One must use his wits in dealing with maledictions.
The town’s lack of special quirks was almost a peculiarity in itself.
Since we are not permitted to act, we are obliged to know.
We are sufficiently at the mercy of machines, Roger; if our music must necessarily be mechanical, then it is time for us to throw in the sponge, and abandon all hope for the future of humanity.
Your character, Apollon Zamp, is marred by a certain paltriness of spirit, a diffused universal distrust which I truly deplore.
Gassoon, for all his lore, subscribed to a common fallacy: he assumed that all those whom he encountered appraised him in the same terms as he did himself.
Roger tried to find out all about her: he wanted, in one brief hour, to make up for a lifetime of non-acquaintance, a lifetime for all practical purposes wasted.